the food production and consumption at the site:
It was impossible to tell if Poverty Point people had farmed, or if they had made a living some other way, such as by intensively gathering native wild plants or by hunting and gathering along the especially bountiful narrow environmental seams where uplands joined the Mississippi floodplain. We still do not have much information about foods eaten by Poverty Point peoples, but we have enough to be sure about one thing. Poverty Point peoples were not corn farmers. They were hunter-gatherers. We are only beginning to find out what they ate. We have more information about meat than plants, because bones are more resistant to decay through time and are more easily recovered by standard excavation methods.(1999: 12–13)
This attitude is understandable for at least two reasons: first, because Gibson himself had the same prejudices archaeologists had, in general, vis-à-vis so-called “primitive” societies and cultural complexity, and second, because it is always extremely difficult to go against commonly accepted knowledge – that is, it was hard to go against the dominant paradigm in the discipline. If we look at the questions posed by Gibson himself, we will see, between the lines, some of the anxieties that haunt archaeologists even today. One of them is the relationship of agriculture to social complexity, as we have already seen. Yet an even more important one is present throughout the whole series of questions: the one that has complexity itself, as a concept, at its center. That is, I believe, one of the more serious problems faced today by those of us concerned with the past of Indigenous peoples.
If one looks at the questions carefully, there is a constant tension between the pair of concepts “simple/complex,” which is always resolved, at least value-wise, in favor of the latter. In this context (that of the disciplines produced by Western knowledge apparatuses and institutions) complex is better or more desirable than simple. Complex, according to the above-mentioned questions, are those communities that “rise above” (to quote Gibson literally) their contemporaries. Now we see another dichotomy enter the scene: above/below. “Complex” and “above” go together, while their opposites are “simple” and “below.” The axiology these oppositions propose is based on a series of Western concepts and prejudices that philosopher Jacques Derrida called logocentrism: the division of the world in conceptual pairs, one of which is considered to be better than, or above the other. In this context, some scholars who try to vindicate Indigenous cultures from the past or the present are caught in the trap of trying to prove that Amerindians are not as simple as portrayed by Western scholarship and popular beliefs while at the same time are reaffirming the very same structures that postulate the inferiority of Indigenous peoples in comparison to Western culture.
For example, if one wants to study aboriginal societies in a place that is at the other end of the world from Poverty Point, say, in Uruguay, it is important to attack the popularly held prejudices that present Amerindians as backward, simple people. For this reason, one of the first things that a young team of archaeologists did in 1986, was to show the academic community, first, and the Uruguayan general public, later, that there was a culture or a series of cultures never mentioned by history textbooks that were much more socially complex than they ever imagined. The excavations conducted mostly by José López Mazz and Roberto Bracco and the papers and ideas written by Leonel Cabrera began the careful construction of a new way of understanding Indigenous peoples from the distant past in Uruguay. That new way included ideas similar to those advanced by Gibson, due to a series of factors, of which I will only mention two: first, the fact that the cultures studied occupied the Uruguayan territory during, among other epochs, the archaic period (some are said to go as far back as 5,000 BP); second, because the archaeological evidence they encountered presented characteristics similar to those of hunter-gatherer societies that built mounds. Their work, then, presented the Uruguayan public opinion with a picture that was completely different from the predominant one. And yet, this was done within the framework provided by the logocentric pairs that tell us that complex is better than simple.10 Worse yet, this growing research corpus has had very little impact on the Uruguayan imaginary with regard to the Indigenous history of the territory: Uruguayan citizens continue to view themselves as inhabitants of a country “without Indians.”11
However, where this defense of complexity gets even worse is in the work produced about regions populated by the most prestigious Amerindian societies: those located in the Andes and Mesoamerica. And beyond academic production, the masses, whether they know it or not, are also under the spell of a cluster of notions associated to complexity. It is not a secret to anyone that sites such as Machu Picchu, Tikal, and others constitute not only a source of revenue for the states of Mexico, Perú and Guatemala, but also destinations for peregrination for believers and new-agers of all kinds.12 The people who comprise this public are almost exclusively interested in the societies that constructed the structures that are now, for the most part, in ruins. These structures are, more often than not, monumental in nature, so monumental that they do not cease to astonish visitors who look at them in amazement for long periods of time, sometimes for many hours or even days. Anybody who has visited any of those sites knows that the image of astounded tourists is part of the landscape. Western amazement before monumentality from the past is twofold. On the one hand, there is a genuine wonder caused by the sheer spectacularity of some of the buildings constructed by Indigenous peoples of the past. On the other, there is an assumption that the cultures that built those structures must have been very complex and, therefore, very civilized.
A word about the concept “civilization” when applied to an Indigenous culture: it is another form of saying that said culture resembles Western civilization in some way or another. That is, it refers to cultures that are, in the Occidental eyes of the observer, comparable to ours. To our eyes, then, those societies who were civilized were capable, like ours, of building monumental structures and vice-versa: they were able to build those structures because they were civilized. Monumentality, then, is a standard against which Western subjects measure the degree of civilization of the culture that produced it.13 And monuments built 500 years ago or earlier are, in general and very likely, in ruins. This leads me to another related issue: the fascination of our culture with ruins. Some prefer them clean and tidy, others (like Christopher Woodward) like them invaded by nature – that is, covered by vegetation – but both segments of the public love ruins, period. What does this penchant for decaying structures tell us about our culture and our relationship to Indigenous societies of the past?
To begin with, it tells us that we prefer to see Amerindians as people from the past whose buildings are there as a testament to their past greatness. This means that they are not here, with us, anymore, which would explain why there is nobody to take care of, or to use the ruins in the ways they were intended to be used at the time of their construction. It also means that we can take care of those ruins without much of a feeling of guilt: if the original dwellers are not here anymore, why not honor their memory by taking care of them? The problem is that the average Western present-day observer does not ask herself why the builders of the ruins they are seeing are not there to take care of them any more. Again, like in the case of the Clovis theory, this is a way people from the present appropriate the work and objects produced by Indigenous peoples from the past.
This appropriation has several negative consequences for the way we envision Amerindian pasts. One of them is that in the regions where the Inca, the Mexica, or the Maya cultures flourished, other cultures from the past do not get the same kind of attention. Although for academics who specialize in the Americas’ past, the existence of other cultures that preceded, and coexisted with, those major cultures is a well-known fact, this is not so clear to public opinion. For most people in the world, the Amerindians who thrived in the Andes are the Incas, the ones who dominated Mesoamerica are the Maya and the Mexica (or Aztecs, the most popular name applied to them). And even if one looks at the body of scholarly work, one will see that the enormous majority of research produced about those areas has been devoted, until very recently, to the aforementioned cultures. It is only in the last few decades that work like that produced by Steve Stern on Huamanga, or Karen Spalding on the Huarochirí (for the Andes), and that produced by James Lockhart (for Mesoamerica), just to offer some of the most prominent examples of this kind of scholarship, started
